Move on (S2020): lessons from my last side projects
I say these words regularly. Why not write about it?
You may have noticed I don’t like to fit in a box and love moving from one environment to another, even if I’m not a fan of moving from all to all. I’d rather do that than stay idle.
Topics, in case you want to skip ahead:
- Life
- Walk
- ClearList
- Now what
Life
The last few months were really… interesting. No need to remember what went wrong in the world lately. Life is tough sometimes. Never forget all the privileges you have. Give back whenever you can and help make the world a better place.
I’ve been reading Becoming Steve Jobs, which I recommend even if you don’t like the man. You see all the things he went through to become the leader he was.
My 2nd year at HETIC ended in late June. It was a cool year spent there with mindful people, both students and staff. I love spending time there — the place is really motivating and pushes us higher.
I also had my first internship, which was a really nice experience into the professional world. I learned many things, and taught a few others.
About Walk
Back in 2017, I thought about an app that would promote local tourism. I had a little thinking about it and decided that a webapp or app would be the perfect fit: suggest monuments around your location based on a free-time parameter. It would then generate a circular walk. You can read more about it here.
After a really nice Product Hunt launch (pro tip: don’t launch publicly when your hosting provider is doing planned maintenance), with a few anecdotes worth sharing over a coffee if we meet, I wasn’t seeing all the issues that might exist.
The most obvious one was the UX — what a mess to have to sign up for this. I was thinking from the developer side and not the user side anymore at some point while building it. When I came back to the user side, I saw how hard it was to keep the benefits of an actual walk: having to use a defined, imposed path over a free path was the opposite of the problem I was trying to solve.
How have I tried to fix it?
At first, I did nothing.
I thought “well it’s over, the product is done, now let’s wait and see where it goes by itself”. After months, I was demotivated. It was going nowhere. I was a bit disappointed but mostly careless — I was focused on something else now, and Walk was secondary.
Then, I thought of by-products. The idea was Placeez, a real-time shared walk to meet new people. Hard to think today in a coronavirus-related environment, but back then, it had more sense.
Based on my motivation I knew it would go nowhere as it needed some technical aspect of a real-time secured place. So I thought: what about Walk but for going from A to B by car? Planning a road trip. It was logical: each year, I go on holidays in the south of France, and we cross a well-known bridge called Viaduc de Millau — there may be other really cool things to see when going there.
Nothing went anywhere.
I preferred walking in Paris and seeing where it took me instead of a predefined path. I was not motivated by the idea anymore.
As a last run-up, I wanted to make a Walk 2.0, Walk Nearby. Rebuild everything from the ground up. No more friction. Just insights. Walk where you want, and if we detect a cool monument nearby, we send you a notification.
Postmortem
At my college, the story made some noise as two other students built a similar app. It was both frustrating and motivating. Back then, this felt like the Facebook story. I know I haven’t reacted/acted correctly with them, and I’m now trying to behave better. Congrats to their work — they’ve done something great and they’re now working on their own paths, which is really driving them to a cool place.
In this area there are many competitors, but nobody had this search-engine approach we had (crowd-sourcing data to make it more powerful and reliable).
I should have stopped earlier if I were honest with myself and acknowledged I was not motivated anymore.
I wanted a dead-simple app with not too many options for the user (I still think too many options is showing your lack of decision as a product owner), but my first vision deviated into something too different from my needs and from the market. I ended up forgetting the user part for a developer-easy-take path.
When I saw many reactions on my Product Hunt launch (#5 Product of the Day, up to #3) and in my KPIs (740 downloads, 308 sign-ups within the first 2 months — this feature has been deleted since — 1200 walks created), I hesitated between continuing or stopping. Was it the correct KPIs? Real feedback?
Adding features as a way to gain traction is a weak product management strategy. First find your market. Make the product useful. Pivot if needed. Rewrite from the ground up if you’re motivated. But don’t add 20+ features if your core feature isn’t what people are looking for.
I learned many things, from preparing a launch to listening to more real feedback and testing the product from a user’s point of view.
About ClearList
I started ClearList in 2018 as a way to learn Node.js and become more autonomous with it.
It was a few months before I joined HETIC as a freshman, and I needed a relaxing side project away from the main one.
In summer 2019, I implemented Stripe to make ClearList my first paid product (at least to cover costs, nothing more), bought a domain name, and launched on Product Hunt.
It went well — no downtime, hosted on Heroku. So well that the free tier of the database provider wasn’t enough and I received many emails noticing me database writes were disabled. I did the database migration from my phone, in Spain, on a day off-site for holidays.
The product wasn’t meant to last. I had no product evolution strategy: put your links, set your schedule, boom. People made feedback, so I implemented Pocket and other little features such as reschedule.
I learned how to use environment variables and GitHub Actions for Continuous Deployment. The project is open-source.
Now what?
Many updates on this post — it’s been a while since the last one. I should also update my website as it’s full of old information.
Now, I’m looking for more human in my work. I love working alone and relying only on myself (better for deadlines), but I need more interaction. I don’t want to be seen as the developer only. After my internship, I’m sure that being behind a screen all day long is not what I want. I need human, I need interaction, I need to know more and do more.
I’ve started thinking about a new project, called Internland, which you can follow on Twitter. Nothing to share for now, still doing research about how it could work. Stay tuned.
In October it’ll be time to go back to school. I’ve worked on different projects related to my college and I’m impatient to know how people will react. Everybody involved is kind and motivated, and I love working with them.
I won’t find my way ‘cause I’m ‘bout to rebuild it — Riles